U Are the Universe

Andriy drives a truck in space. He works for a company hauling nuclear waste and is to leave his load on a moon of Jupiter. Routine work. Then there is an explosion. Earth is gone. There is nobody on the radio, control does not answer, and Andriy takes himself for the last person in the universe. There is a robot on the ship and he talks to it. Then a signal comes. A woman is transmitting from a station near Saturn. She speaks French. The two try to understand each other. Andriy turns his course towards her; the fuel may not last. Pavlo Ostrikov writes and directs; it is his first feature. Volodymyr Kravchuk plays Andriy and Alexia Depicker the woman. It is a Ukrainian and Belgian co-production. The film had its world premiere in the Discovery section of the Toronto Film Festival on 7 September 2024. It was shot and edited in Kyiv; part of the work went on during the bombardment and missile attacks at the start of 2022. The matter it treats is loneliness; the science fiction ground builds not a disaster narrative but a story of two people. The film was made on a low budget and the sets are handmade; the interior of the ship is deliberately old and worn. The robot is the source of the humour and keeps the register light. The narrative takes the absence of a shared language between the two as a direct subject. The ending gives no large resolution and the distance does not close. Its limit is scale; the narrative is small, there is little event, and the pace slow. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet science fiction and Eastern European cinema. Who it is not for: it is slow, small in scale, and the ending unresolved.